DifferencesBetweenMriAndJruby

Differences Between MRI And JRuby

Although ideally MRI and JRuby would behave 100% the same in all situations, there are some minor differences. Some differences are due to bugs, and those are not reported here. This page is for differences that are not bugs.

Table of Contents

1. Native C extensions
2. Continuations
3. Invoking external processes
4. Fork is not implemented
5. Native Endian is Big Endian
6. Time precision
7. Regular expressions
8. Thread priority

Native C Extensions

JRuby cannot run native C extensions. Popular libraries have all generally been ported to Java Native Extensions. Also, now that [FFI](http://kenai.com/projects/ruby-ffi/pages/Home) has become a popular alternative to binding to C libraries, using it obviates the need to write a large chunk of native extensions.

Continuations

JRuby does not support [continuations](http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/ref_c_continuation.html) ([Kernel.callcc](http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/ref_m_kernel.html#Kernel.callcc)).

Fork is not implemented

JRuby doesn't implement `fork()` on any platform, including those where `fork()` is available in MRI.

Native Endian is Big Endian

Since the JVM presents a _compatible_ CPU to JRuby, the _native_ endianness of JRuby is Big Endian. This does matter for operations that depend on that behavior, like `String#unpack` and `Array#pack` for formats like `I`, `i`, `S`, and `s`.

Time precision

Since it is not possible to obtain `usec` precision under a JVM, `Time.now.usec` cannot return values with microsecond precision.

Example:

> Time.now.usec
=> 582000

Keep this in mind when counting on usec precision in your code.

Regular expressions

JRuby only has one regular expression engine, which matches Onigurama's behavior. It is not changed in --1.8 mode, so code depending on regular expressions behaving precisely as on MRI 1.8.n may fail on JRuby in --1.8 mode. For instance:

ruby-1.8.7-p302 > "a".match(/^(.*)+$/)[1]
=> "a"

jruby-head > "a".match(/^(.*)+$/)[1]
=> ""

Thread priority

In MRI, the Thread priority can be set to any value in Fixnum (if native threads are enabled) or -3..3 (if not). The default value is 0.

In JRuby, Threads are backed by Java threads, and the priority ranges from 1 to 10, with a default of 5. If you pass a value outside of this range to Thread#priority=, the priority will be set to 1 or 10.

(See http://bugs.jruby.org/5289 and http://bugs.jruby.org/5290.)